The present invention relates to a battery as a subject of authentication and an authentication requesting device that is connected to the battery and issues a battery authentication request.
In recent years, various consumer electronics appliances including home game machines have increased in functionality and types whose functions can be extended by connecting peripheral devices to the appliance main body have increased. In such appliances, to avoid such trouble as results from a user erroneously connecting a product of another company to the appliance main body, there may occur a case that it is desired to judge whether a peripheral device is authentic (genuine).
One method for this purpose is to subject the appliance main body and the peripheral device to authentication processing generally used in computer systems to a check as to whether a peripheral device is authentic. For example, a general example of challenge-response-type authentication is disclosed in JP-A-11-163853.
Incidentally, in recent years, even for batteries, makers that provide fake (counterfeit) products have appeared, which increasingly cause problems such as unstable supply of power because of differences in electrical ratings. Therefore, even for batteries, it is now increasingly necessary to perform authentication processing to check whether a product is authentic. For this purpose, a battery authentication method disclosed in JP-T-2000-517487 (the symbol “JP-T” as used herein means a published Japanese translation of a PCT patent application) may be employed.
However, in contrast to information apparatus, appliances used in homes such as consumer electronics appliances may have the drawback of generating a large amount of electric noise during operation. One way to counteract this is to perform authentication processing repeatedly to increase the reliability of the authentication.
However, where authentication processing is performed repeatedly, the amount of data that are exchanged between a peripheral device and the main body becomes large and the communication load increases accordingly. In consumer electronics appliances and the like, processing that relates to the functions of the appliance itself takes priority. Therefore, it is not desirable to increase the load of communications that are performed between the main body and a peripheral device and do not relate to the functions of the appliance itself.
Further, in the above conventional authentication method, consideration is not given to problems specific to a device to be authenticated such as a problem that a battery is not charged up.